Digital health

What can be observed under the notion of digital health? What are the key arguments that shift public and private sector investments towards digital health innovation? And what kind of theoretical approaches enable us to disentangle the complexities and ambivalences at play when digital technologies are embedded in practices of health and medicine? This chapter provides an overview of the area of digital health, first examining some of the key developments since the 1980s and the promissory discourse that often accompanies these developments. It then offers critiques of such promissory discourse at two levels. First, it introduces the social theories that seek to explain the societal consequences of digitalisation and the arising health data economies. Second, it presents the more empirically-driven socio-technical approaches that have sought to understand the situated character of digital health. Following this, a socio-technical lens is used to identify three central aspects of digitalisation that are then explored in detail: quantification, connectivity, and instantaneity. Using examples from different case studies, an argument is made for how digitalisation is associated with three types of the (re)configuration of healthcare: in knowledge about health and illness, in relationships between patients and healthcare professionals, and in new forms of control shifted between technologies and human agents in practices of care. Overall, the chapter aims to provide the reader with important theoretical concepts to approach the study of digital health and its potential benefits and drawbacks across different social situations